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What is Considered Good and Bad Land?

By: Mark Podolsky | August 14, 2012

Most often flat land is the least expensive to develop and the most desired for building purposes.  However, be careful when buying flat land because the worst thing you can do is buy swamp or marshland. Land with barren rock will increase costs and virtually eliminate a basement just the same as a high water table.  The best $150 you can spend is investing in an online research company such as www.homeinfomax.com. Also, please review the mapping program included regarding expertgps.com in association with Google Earth. Short of visiting the parcel, this is going to give you 90% of the land story, plus you’ll have great maps to provide your potential buyers!

Regarding the quality of the soil – high quality soil appears rich and dark in color and is considered ideal for most purposes.  You don’t want soil that is hard, cracking ground when dry and then sticky soil when wet. Warning! Check with your state offices for the presence of expansive soils; this stuff cracks foundations in the most insidious ways, leading many to ruin.

Many people are literally being driven to the hills -granted the views can be spectacular but roads, utilities, water, sewer, and foundations, such as pilings, can add 25-30% to building costs alone, further adding to this already expensive proposition. When considering going vertical, an 8-degree slope is about the limit when concerning building economically on hillsides.  Plots with trees, a view, rectangular in shape, a gentle slope or none and a good location are most often preferred, and streams can boost values by 100% in some cases.

How to Determine the Value of Raw Land

Using the appraisers standard view of estimating value can give us some clues, so let’s look at what appraisers do!

* Site size and shape, represented by frontage, width and depth.

* Corner influence equals visibility for commercial, or privacy for residential

* Plottage, has assembly or combining of parcels been accomplished

* How much land is excess or surplus; surplus has less value than what is required

* Topography: Land’s contour, grading, natural drainage, soil, view and usefulness

* Utilities: Sewers, drinking water, natural gas, electric, telephone, cable, etc.

* Site improvements: Landscaping, fences, gutters, walks, drives and irrigation

* Accessibility: Parking, location, streets, alleys, connecting roads and highways

* Environment: Climate, adequate water supply, air quality, rivers, lakes, oceans and the absence of any hazardous materials

An old timer once gave me this advice: He said, “Mark, always try to buy land that is located as close to those amenities that an area is famous for, as that is often the reason people come to certain areas. He lived in Florida and had plenty of beachfront property located in tourist areas, which clearly illustrated his point.

Raw Land Income Ideas: Generate Income with Your Raw Land!

By: Mark Podolsky | July 16, 2012

Summary

There are so many different ways to make money if you own land.  If your goal is to create income using an existing asset, you might be surprised how creative you can get even with a small piece of land you.

Pasturing animals

If your land includes fields, you might want to take a look through the on-line and paper classified ads in your area. More than likely you will be able to identify horse or cow owners who are looking for space to graze their animals.  What a fantastic way to make money and if your land includes large pasture areas, the animals will keep the grass down so you can even save money!

Hunting rights

If you own wooded land suitable for hunting, you can rent your land out during hunting season.  Best of all, you can charge by the person or charge a flat fee.  You are in control with this one, making it one of the best ways to make extra money while maintaining full use of your land during the off-season. If you have wildlife on your land, I recommend that you explore this income-generating possibility.

Storage

Have you noticed how many mini-storage rentals there are? If you have a building on site, this is another potentially lucrative way to make extra money. These days no-one seems to have enough room to store their stuff which makes storage space a prime way to earn some extra income.  Even if you only have an old barn or shed you can store four wheelers or boats during the off-season (or trailers, campers, snowmobiles, classic cars etc.).

Camping

If you have level, open land that would be suitable for camping, you might want to look into the logistics of starting a basic campground.  Depending on the current condition of your property, it is possible to start up a campground with only a small amount of start-up money. Usually to get started you only need stakes to make the sites, some campfire rings, a port-a-potty and signs.  There are so many free and inexpensive ways to advertise these days such as Craig’s List and backpage.com that you can at least place an ad and see what kind of interest it generates.  If there is interest in your area, you have a pretty simple way to generate passive income without having to make a large upfront investment or doing expensive upkeep.

Logging

If your property includes wooded areas, it might be smart to get a few quotes from different logging companies to see how much you could earn from the timber.  In order to preserve the value of the land and to be a good environmental steward of your property, I do not recommend that you clear-cut the land.  However, you may be able to log part of it while preserving some of the wooded areas.  You might want to look into logging companies that cut sustainably by selectively harvesting only certain kinds of trees. This protects the value of the land as well as lessens the negative impact on the environment.   Just do a Google search on “sustainable logging companies” in your state.

Flea markets

If your land is in a high traffic area, I suggest that you look into renting it out as a flea market. Do you know how many small tables you can fit on an acre of land? Even if you charge just $15/day for each vendor and you have 20 vendors/day for the first year, you are already generating an additional $300/day which comes to more than $2,000/week. This is a very low-cost way to make use of your land while helping to connect local vendors and consumers in your community.  As usual, do some research on the logistics before diving in.

Cropland

Depending on the kind of farming that exist in your area, there may be individuals or larger companies looking to lease land short-term or long-term for farming purposes.  If you have tillable land, it could be worth your while to place an advertisement in the local papers as well as places like Craig’s List and backpage.com to see if you get any hits.

Power leases

In this day of alternative energy, it is possible to make money leasing rural land to wind generating companies or others within the alternative power industry. However, the details about this are too complex to cover in this article. I do explore these topics on my blog which you can access through my company website or check into other articles that I have posted here on Ezine.com on the topic.

Paintball Fields

Providing space for paintball “wars” is still a big industry.  If you are in doubt, just check out all the paintball fields linked through this website: http://www.pbreview.com/fields/ As you can imagine, it does not take that much to make your raw, rural land “paintball” ready.  Essentially you just section off all or part of your land and rent it out to groups.  Just to give you an idea of how it works, here is a a link to an example of a privately-owned paintball field: http://www.actionpaintballsac.com/

Conclusion

Land is an asset especially for those who are creative and determined enough to invest the time and energy into getting something started.  Just be sure to do the proper research before you get started such as finding out if you need a license or permit and dot all your “i’s” and cross all your “t’s.” Good luck!

 

How I First Started Making Money in Raw Land

By: Mark Podolsky | July 11, 2012

In my last post I shared the story of my life before I learned how to buy and sell land. I also told you about how I first learned about the raw land industry from an old high school buddy.  So, how did I get from working a dead-end job to making over $500,000/year? Let’s pick up where we left off.

After talking with my high-school buddy, I decided to learn everything I could about real estate.  It took great courage to step out of my comfort zone to start looking into something new but I knew I had to make a change. I spent many late nights investigating every aspect of real estate – I researched and read articles and content online, went to my local library and read many different books on the topic.  Finally, I felt like it was time to take my first step! I can remember my first land auction in New Mexico –  I was so nervous that my hands were sweating.  My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest!  I had no idea what I was going to say to my wife because I was about to spend the last $3,000 we had been saving for car repairs! It took a huge leap of faith – and it turned out to be a very important leap of faith.

I remember when I came home from the land auction I proudly told my wife that I had acquired land. She responded in a frightened voice: “What do we do if you can’t sell it?” I said: “Well, the worst case scenario is that we own land!  It’s not like it becomes obsolete, or spoils or is some product fad!  It’s land and it lasts forever!”  However, all went well.  I had bought 9 lots of land at an average price of $100 per parcel.  Within 30 days I sold them all at an average price of $900! I took the profit from the first auction – and went to a second auction in Arizona and ended up making over $90,217 in the next 3 months! That was my wife realized I had made a good decision by purchasing raw land!

And that was when I first felt the true value of working in the area of raw land. After making $90,000 in 3 months I now had the enough knowledge and confidence to keep going.  I also knew that if I stuck with it I could do eventually do this full-time. I knew I could earn more money in months than I could at my dead-end, soul-sucking sales job for an entire year!  However, at this point, though I was making money, I had really had no idea what I was doing!  I set out to master this business in 18 months.  I wanted to understand every detail of this undertaking so I could do this full time and quit my job forever.  Before I could do that, however, I needed to be able to confidently look my wife in the eyes and guarantee 100% success.

It was rough in those early years because I made mistake after mistake.  It seemed like I had to learn every step the hard way.  However, I just kept working to overcome those mistakes by creating blueprints and systems I could depend on and refining the process.  My overarching goal was to experience financial freedom so I wanted to learn how to make my money work for me and create a system that would run on auto-pilot.

Now the systems I put in place eleven years ago do just that – I work a few hours every day & then I spend time with my family.  Meanwhile I am earning six figures with no more commute to work, no boss, and no more worrying about how I’m going to pay my bills.  If I want to take one or two months off I can and I still do not have to worry about being able to pay my bills because now I have money coming in regardless of whether I am working or not.

Now I have the time in my schedule to work out because I make my own hours; I can go to all the kids’ activities, take my time, have lunch with them for as long as I want and work when I want to work.  I so am blessed and I know it.  Last year was the worst real estate market in recorded history since the Great Depression – in fact 2011 was a terrible year for real estate and the economy overall.   However my land buying blueprint is still effective. I made exactly $454,516.18! Just think what you can do in this industry when times improve?

My high-school buddy gave me the knowledge that eventually allowed me to change my life.  He helped me more than he will ever know and now I help other people learn to do what I do. They remove that paycheck to paycheck frustration from their lives just by learning to effectively buy and sell land.  I hope my story has illustrated an important concept for you – anyone can experience financial freedom!  Anyone can completely transform their lives the way that I did!  If I did it, you can too!

Please contact me,  Mark the Land Geek, directly to learn more about my hourly coaching and consulting services where you can learn everything from deal flow, marketing and due diligence and more so you can make an incredible full time or part time income buying and selling raw land.  You can also contact me for a free 15-minute consultation.   I have also created several land coaching programs to meet every budget from FREE at http://www.3fatallandbuyingmistakes.com/ to just $47 at http://www.artofthelandflip.com/ and we have other programs as well.  

 Contact Mark today: Phone: 1 (800) 428-3760 Email:  [email protected]

Why I Started Investing

By: Mark Podolsky | June 25, 2012

Sometimes I wonder if my readers think I’ve always lived this life.  Maybe some of you don’t know about my humble beginnings.  I like to share my story because it is a reminder that anyone can transform their life!  My story begins back in 2001. My wife and I were living paycheck-to-paycheck – just barely making ends meet. On top of that we had a 6-month old baby. Anyone who has children knows the incredible stress that this bundle of joy brings to a household – no more downtime for yourself; month-after-month of sleepless nights and the stress of trying to figure out how to care for a new being 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

My life was defined by my high-pressure job as a business broker. I only made money through commissions and I had a very low salary to high commissions basis. I did not know how much I could expect to bring in month-to-month so even if I closed a big deal one month I had to make that money last the entire year. On top of that I had a 45 minute commute to and from work. I was so stressed out 24/7 that I felt like a ticking time bomb.

I hated every aspect of my job and it was affecting my entire life. Every day I had to walk into the offices of people who did not know me. The worst part was that these people did not want to know me. In order to make money I had to try to convince them to let me do one of two things: 1) sell their business or 2) represent them in buying a business. I had to do all of this despite the fact that I was given no knowledge of their company.  I was totally miserable. I still remember that feeling of dread when my alarm would buzz everyday when I had to get up to go to work.  After so long the situation finally affected me to the point where I became depressed. I remember at night when I would come home from work I did not even have the energy to engage my wife in conversation.  On some days I did not even have it in me to eat dinner. The combination of the stress level and our limited income was really affecting our marriage.

I just did not see a way out. I was so tired and fed-up with a work environment based on lies, politics and brown-nosing. Just being close to that world made me feel dirty. However, I felt like I was stuck in a no-win situation. I could not make good money within that job while being true to myself. At the same time my family was paying the price. One of the main arguments at home was about organic baby food – my wife felt it was very important for the health of our son. Yet I knew we just did not have the money. Although I had a new baby I hardly ever got to spend time with him.

To succeed in my current job at that time I would have had to sacrifice my integrity. I did not want to do have to make that decision. I did not want to have to sell things just to make a commission check so I decided I would not sacrifice my integrity. So I started looking into other opportunities and shortly after I ran into an old high school buddy of mine who told me he was making money hand over fist buying land at county tax foreclosure auctions and flipping them on eBay. He was making 300% profits! He wrote down some of his secrets on the back of a napkin and invited me to attend a tax-sale auction with him. I remember saying to myself: “This could be it!”

Check out my next blog post to learn the rest of the story and how I got started making a comfortable living just by buying and selling land on-line!

Why Should I Buy Land From You?

By: Mark Podolsky | May 30, 2012

 Don’t just invest in property with me because I have great prices and easy terms. Or because I have an A+ Better Business Bureau Rating or because of my “No Unhappy Investors” philosophy.  Work with me because I’m actually available to answer your questions! 

I’m always amazed and pleasantly surprised when someone calls me with a land question  and then thanks me for either picking up the phone or calling them right back.

In an age of instant communication with Facebook or Twitter feeds you would think it wouldn’t be such a big deal for owners of companies to answer their own phone! Yet, people are either busy or want to appear busy so they can respond on their own terms. However, I’ve learned that if someone is going to call a complete stranger with a question that must be really important.  They could’ve just as easily e-mailed the question or run a Google search for the answer. As a result, being accessible can be a competitive advantage. In fact, oftentimes customers will tell me they bought my property over my competitor’s simply because I answered the phone or got right back with them.

 Don’t forget to subscribe to my quarterly newsletter to get land deals, tips and other goodies! Just click below to subscribe:

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Do You Want To Hang Out on Google Plus?

By: Mark Podolsky | May 21, 2012

One of the coolest new features of Google Plus is hangouts.  Hangouts allow up to 9 people to video chat.  However, anyone can eavesdrop on the chat and listen in.  It’s a great way to have a meeting, strategy session, question and answer format, etc. without costing any money!  I was thinking this would be a cool way for people to learn more about land and have the ability to ask me questions and even see my ugly mug on video.   It’s always fun to use new technology and learn at the same time. 

The hangouts get streamed live on to my YouTube channel for those whom just want to watch and don’t want to participate.  

So, let me know if you want to hang out and I’ll start holding Hang Out times for you to join if you so choose!

Looking forward to hanging!

 

Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge

By: Mark Podolsky | May 17, 2012

Einstein is famous for his quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”   This simple sentiment applies especially to raw land. 

Raw land is your canvass and you are the artist.  If you simply expand your imagination, the uses for raw land are unlimited.  I have land clients who have implemented unbelievably creative ways to increase the value of their property or have expanded the typical use for their parcels.  For example, I have one land client who converted his 40 acre parcel into a dirt bike course.  I have another customer who uses social media to promote weekend games on the land like paint ball, find the hidden gold nugget, or capture the flag.  He organizes it, his buddies bring people out to the land, they each pay a fee and they all have a great time getting back to nature and bonding in a rural setting.  I have another customer who uses her land for an equine therapy business.  It’s just amazing what you can do and accomplish with raw land.   If you want some more raw land ideas and especially if you want to generate a passive income check out this link .

If you are interested in learning about how to buy and sell land as a business for yourself I encourage you to check out a new digital product I created, “More Deals than You Can Handle.”

For more information call me at 800-4128-3760 for a free 15 minute consultation or visit my website: http://www.frontierpropertiesusa.com/land-coaching/

An Investors perspective: Land versus Houses

By: Mark Podolsky | May 9, 2012

 People always ask me why I don’t focus more on buying and flipping homes rather than buying and flipping land?   For me, the answer is simple. In order to buy a good home for a flip,  you have to find a home that already has equity. So you work the  short sale markets, foreclosure auctions, REO deals from your bank or the for sale by owner advertisements all in the hopes of finding that special deal.   Let’s say  you get lucky and find a home that actually has equity in it and you were able to secure it from all the other professional investors in your area (and that is a big accomplishment).   Now, you have to do the exhaustive analysis. How much is going to cost to improve the house? Do you need to replace the appliances? Are you in a neighborhood that would require granite countertops?   Will you have to improve the landscaping? Is the cabinetry old?  Typically, the best investment / improvement in a home for flipping is going to be in the kitchen and bathrooms. If you aren’t set up to make these improvements yourself, you’re going to have to find a few contractors to help you. And of course you know what they say good help is hard to find… After you have priced out the improvements now you have to hire a realtor to help you market and sell your property within the comps. If you bought right, and you did your financial analysis correctly after the realtors fees, title fees and improvements hopefully there is enough of a profit to make this labor-intensive venture worth your while.

Now let’s compare this to buying and flipping land.  First, you have to buy the property at the right price just like a house.  However, since there are fewer professional land flippers there is an enormous opportunity to find deal after deal and typically it’s just as simple as sending offers to out of state owners whom owe back taxes.  Voila!  You have a deal.  That was quick!  Now, you don’t have any maintenance issues, no worries about a past tenant damaging your land or any other headaches… It’s just raw land.  You can choose to improve it inexpensively by hiring a surveyor and marking the boundaries or fencing the property.  Plus, inexpensive land is just that, inexpensive.  You don’t have to worry about bank financing, and all the other fees associated with buying a house.  

Now, you can inexpensively market the property yourself online via Craigslist, eBay classifieds and other free online avenues to drive traffic to your listing.  Since the property is relatively inexpensive you also have a larger pool of buyers to choose from as you aren’t hampered by a neighborhood, school district or a home owners association that will limit your pool of house buyers.  As  a result, I can make a strong argument your return on your land investment will be less time consuming, take less financial analysis and make you a better return on investment with less inherent risk.  

Let me know if you think I’m delusional.

By the way, learn how to avoid the 3 Fatal Land Buying Mistakes I see land investors make everyday.  

Wayne Gretsky & Land Investing

By: Mark Podolsky | April 30, 2012

Wayne Gretzky, arguably the greatest athlete that has ever dominated sports, has an amazing quote I think about all the time. He said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” 

When we apply this thinking towards land investing we start to consider investments outside of the box. No longer are we interested in property that is located in populated areas, but now we are interested in where the growth is going to be a year, 5 years or 10 years from now.  I just acquired property outside of Las Vegas 15 min. from Kingman,  Arizona.   I love the fact that the property is located near the Grand Canyon,  Flagstaff  and Hoover Dam.   

 Clearly, I’m investing where the growth is going to be not where it is!   The key of course with any investment is buying at the right price. That is the difference between speculating and investing. There are no guarantees of course, but Wayne Gretzky was also famous for saying,  “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!”

 So, when you are looking at making a land investment think like the Great One and hopefully you will score a an amazing land investment simply by following the simple principal of buying where the growth is going to be not where it is now!

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Rich Dad Poor Dad Philosophy With Land

By: Mark Podolsky | April 23, 2012

Take two minutes 44 seconds out of your busy day and learn why I think Land is a great investment for the newbie real estate investor looking to build their net worth.   Remember you can always contact me for a free 15 minute consultation to discuss if the land business may be right for you.  

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6psKPqIFUw” title=”Rich%20Dad%20Poor%20Dad%20Real%20Estate%20Philosophy” rel=”0″]
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